Dance and Crafts
with Milka Djordjevich
Tuesdays, September 2, 9, 16, 23, 30
& October 7 Final Showing
6-9pm
$275 for 6 sessions (participants attend all sessions)
*Subsidized rate available–please note circumstances in google form.
Max 15 participants
Location:
Stomping Ground – Warehouse Space
5453 Alhambra Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90032
Let’s craft dances. We’ll design, weave, engineer, deconstruct, spew, sculpt, distort, reconfigure, destroy, regurgitate and resurrect dances. Let’s push our brains/bodies to the limit. Let’s make impossible dances. Failure is the only option. All movement backgrounds are welcome. Get ready to move. The workshop is open to performance doers/makers, actors, dancers and choreographers interested in crafting movement.
This six-week workshop led by Djordjevich, is an opportunity to re-evaluate your current movement-making practice and/or discover the expansive potential of movement and dance. We will invent and design methods for generating movement, in order to reveal how they can subvert and/or amplify established systems or habits. Digging deeper into the ‘activities’ that surround movement and dance making, we will play with the choreographic capacity of assorted modalities, such as action, language, sound, image, object, context and situation. Working within these modalities will allow us to challenge our own definitions and assumptions of our creative practice, giving way to new discoveries and deeper understanding of our choreographic potential.
Each session starts with a physical warm-up, followed by choreographic, improvisational and/or task-based exercises. There will sometimes be quick and dirty movement assignments, showings and peer feedback. Between sessions, participants will be offered reflective prompts in preparation for the next session. We will practice making dances for ourselves and for others.
Our work together will culminate with an informal showing at the final session on Tuesday, October 7th.
PLEASE FILL OUT THIS FORM TO RESERVE YOUR SPOT: https://forms.gle/dqGJ2RP69po99W7UA
SPOT IS ONLY RESERVED ONCE PAYMENT IS RECEIVED ON A FIRST COME FIRST SERVE BASIS. VIA PAYPAL: https://www.paypal.com/ncp/payment/2G7Y7ZUKPRP6G
Preparation: Come to the first session with 30 seconds to 1 minute of original material that you can perform yourself. Fragments, singular actions, dense moves and anti-choreography are welcome. Please bring a notebook.
Milka Djordjevich is a Serbian-American choreographer, performer and educator whose work blurs the distinction between ‘dance’ and ‘non-dance’ through expanded notions of choreography that operate inside and outside of established dance traditions. Her work examines labor and questions notions of ‘neutrality’ through the perception of gender and identity within the often-presumed ‘neutral’ spaces of theaters, galleries, museums and public contexts.
Past works include her 2024 work Bob–commissioned by and premiered at the American Dance Festival and performed at MOCA and New York Live Arts–is a dance eroticizing the labor of the dancing body–the repetition, the discipline, and the fallout. Her 2021 work CORPS–co-commissioned by New York Live Arts and REDCAT with development support from Jacob’s Pillow, the Baryshnikov Arts Center and MANCC–is an extension of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of movement practices, preoccupied with producing neutrality and anonymity and aims to disorient the militaristic conditioning of groups “keeping together in time.” Her critically acclaimed quartet, ANTHEM (2017), explores labor, play, and feminine-posturing, and was developed as a part of a 2017-2018 Princeton University Hodder Fellowship, received a Bessie nomination for outstanding performer and toured across the country.
Djordjevich’s work also straddles theatrical, visual art, music, fashion and commercial contexts where she has choreographed and movement directed projects such as: Star Choir an opera by Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade, produced by the Industry; pop duo Aly & AJ’s Listen! music video featured in Rolling Stone; Ephemeral Study No. 1, a performance and film created with fashion designer Samuel Gui Yang; the performance and film Time Lapsus, created in collaboration with visual artist Marcos Luytens; Sylvan Oswald’s Vendetta Chrome, directed by Sarah Lyons; and Jesse Bonnell’s Paradise Island, a theater work based on texts written by Richard Foreman. Her long-standing collaborations with composer Chris Peck challenge conventional partnerships between choreographers and composers, rediscovering music as a practice of the body and dance as a mode of listening. Furthermore, she has performed and collaborated with Dragana Bulut, Simone Forti, Victoria Fu, Matt Rich, Heather Kravas, Jennifer Monson, Sasa Asentic, Sam Kim, among others.
She is currently on faculty at UCLA, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy (AMDA) and Body Dada, and has taught at Bennington College, CalArts, Wesleyan University, Pomona College, Pasadena City College, and University of California at Irvine and Riverside, among others. In 2016, she established STANA, an organization cultivating local, national and international dance connections.